In many fields, such as the dental, medical, food service, laboratory, and precision manufacturing fields, reducing the potential for contamination is a primary concern. Because workers in these fields routinely manually handle contaminated or contaminatable materials, it is critical that some type of barrier be interposed between the hands of the workers and the contaminated or contaminatable materials. Typically, this barrier comprises a latex or plastic film glove or mitten. The user places their hand into the glove or mitten prior to handling the contaminated or contaminatable materials and this prevents contamination from being transferred to or from the substance or object being handled.
There are primarily three routes for the transfer of contaminates. The first route is the transfer of contaminates from the contaminated material to the user handling the contaminated material. In the dental, medical and other health care fields, the AIDS epidemic has heightened awareness of the possibility of patients infecting their health care workers with the HIV virus through exposure to body fluids. Even before AIDS was a concern, however, the presence of other highly contagious infectious agents, such as hepatitis, justifiably caused serious concerns among health care workers and resulted in procedures and precautions being implemented for reducing this possible route of contamination. For industrial and laboratory workers handling toxic or hazardous materials, particularly persistent toxins such as mercury, lead and pesticides, extreme precautions are taken to avoid any worker exposure to these materials.
A second route is the transfer of contaminates from the user to the contaminatable object or materials being handled. Some types of computer and electrical components, such as disk drive storage media and halogen light bulbs, can be ruined by being merely touched with an unprotected hand. Detectable amounts of oil, moisture, skin flakes, etc. will inevitably be transferred to any object which is handled with an unprotected hand. Laboratory samples and crime scene evidence are two other types of materials that can easily be contaminated if proper protective hand coverings are not worn.
A third route for contamination is the transfer of contaminates from an earlier object handled by a worker to a later object handled by that worker or a co-worker. This third route is often the most difficult to control because the contamination may be indirect (i.e. it may not be directly from the earlier object to the worker to the later object).
Health care workers typically remove their old gloves and put on new gloves prior to examining or treating a new patient. What may be overlooked, however, is that when their gloves become contaminated during examination or treatment of a patient, any object touched by these gloves, such as a door handle, a pen, a drawer handle, or treatment equipment, may itself become contaminated. When handling particularly virulent infectious agents, an attempt may made to use cleaning or sterilizing agents, such as chemical solutions, to remove or neutralize contaminates which have been transferred to these areas. Remedial measures, such as applying cleaning or sterilizing agents, are typically less than completely effective in eliminating contamination. Similar issues arise when industrial or laboratory workers handle toxic, hazardous or contaminated materials. The preferred method for eliminating this route for contamination is to eliminate the contamination of these areas altogether.
A primary reason these areas become contaminated is the difficulty of removing and putting on typical hand coverings. Typical hand coverings require that the hand or a portion of the hand be place inside and positioned with respect to a closed section of the hand covering. It can take a greater part of a minute to remove a contaminated pair of conventional latex gloves, replace them with a new pair and properly position the new gloves over the user's hands. If after handling potentially contaminated materials, a health care worker must operate treatment equipment, the worker must first remove their current pair of gloves and then put on a new pair of gloves before handling the equipment. To avoid accidentally contaminating the patient with contaminates that may have been present on the machine, the worker must then remove this second pair of gloves and put on a third pair of gloves before again coming into contact with the patient.
In my U.S. Pat. No. 5,774,889, I describe a protective hand covering for adhering to a user's hand. In the preferred embodiment, a pressure-sensitive adhesive is applied to the back surface of a sheet of thin flexible film. The pressure-sensitive adhesive provides a sufficiently strong bond to prevent the hand covering from being inadvertently dislodged, but a sufficiently weak bond to allow the hand covering to be removed without injuring the user. The film is sufficiently impervious to contaminates to prevent the transfer of contaminates from the substance or object being handled to the user, and vice versa.
As disclosed in the '889 patent, the entire content of which is incorporated herein by reference, several methods for packaging and dispensing protective hand coverings are feasible. For example, a stack of protective hand coverings may be packaged in a tablet or fan-fold format. The hand coverings could also be dispensed from a continuous roll mounted in a holder. The importance of the dispenser is that by substantially decreasing the time it takes to remove and put on hand coverings, the time required to perform certain types of procedures can be dramatically reduced. Increasing the ease of putting on (and removing) hand coverings will also encourage workers to put on new hand coverings more frequently, which will in turn reduce the likelihood of indirect contamination.
In my U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,660, also incorporated herein by reference, I describe a dispenser for receiving a roll of thin, flexible film of the type described in my '889 patent. The dispenser includes a backing member over which film may be drawn from the roll through rotation such that the adhesive surface faces outwardly, enabling a user to place the palm and fingers of a hand against the film and backing member prior to severing the film into a sheet now adhered to the hand. The backing member itself preferably forms part of a compressible body enabling a user to squeeze the body through the film for improved adherence of the sheet to the hand.
Various mechanisms may be used alone or in combination to sever the film into an individual sheet. The sheet itself may include lines of perforations, spaced apart along the roll at a distance sufficient to cover a hand. Additionally, the dispenser may include an element which the film is drawn past to cut the film. Such an element may be in the form of a blade having a knife edge or serrations, and maybe heated. Depending upon the configuration, such an element may be between the backing member and the roll or on the other side of the backing member with respect to the roll.
The dispenser may further include a mechanism for preventing the roll from rotating while the film is severed into a sheet. Such a mechanism may also be coupled to the backing member. In the preferred embodiment, the backing member is moveable away from the roll, enabling a user to move the hand bearing against the film and backing member away from the roll to assist in severing the sheet from the roll.